The hotel was a second-floor flat, which seemed to go along the whole length of the street, making it little more than an endless corridor of small rooms. At first there were so many women’s voices coming from them that Frank wondered if they hadn’t stumbled into a brothel, but since he heard no sounds of men he had to conclude differently — though in Tangier you could never be sure. In the next room was a Frenchwoman with two small dogs, and often through the paper-thin walls came the sound of clanking bowls and swilling water, great lip-smacking kisses, and the sliding of the dogs’ paws on the tiled floor.
Their room was the largest in the hotel, the bed a rough frame nailed together, with bedding neatly and skilfully laid on top. There were two old basket chairs, and a small table for books, cigarettes, matches, tangerines and make-up. A sink in one corner had no plug, and one had to keep the faucet pressed to get water — as on a ship. Frank shaped a plug out of a cork, rather, he said, than give up washing. There were two huge coat pegs on the blue wall, and a small piece of Moroccan artisanry for matting on the floor. A single window looked onto a dim alley-street, so that even in daytime they needed the light on. The hotel was on its last legs, and so was more expensive than many others.
They lay at night listening to Moorish music that came from café radios and permeated the whole building, Frank feeling as if he were in the chill-middle of Arabia. Myra warmed him, her belly a stove, kisses still tasting of spice from Moslem food eaten on their day’s wanderings through the winding alleyways of the medina, or of mint and sugar from the innumerable glasses of tea drunk before coming to bed. Frank had bought a spirit stove and cooked-up his own brand of Arab tea at night and morning. They lived in the room a fortnight, and revelled in the refurbishing powers of retreat, a calm hideout in a medieval walled town.
They were strangers there and knew no one, walked up the steep Rue des Siaghines and into, the flower-filled market at the top that smelled of mimosa and cloves. They went on into the new town, along the boulevards and among modern blocks of flats, then got a bus through the suburb of the Dradeb. They climbed up to a point overlooking the straits, with Spain a definite coast only thirteen miles away. A mule track led along the clifftops to Cape Spartel, the shoulder of Africa where Hercules was said to have shaped millstones in his solitary wave-bashed cave. The track climbed above the sea, up then down, from one headland to another, a violent Atlantic wind spitting at the prominent arbutus-horn of Africa. Jebel Kebir was forested, and they turned up into its shelter, a subtle mixture of juniper and eucalyptus smells, laurel and cedar and pine, a moving sky that drew their eyes during rest, as if up there a blacksmith were reshaping clouds that a storm had raged out from its own belly, the wind moving leaves and branches in an inspired concord of smells and shapes.
They made love under the trees (‘He should find his way out without too much bother when the time comes,’ Frank joked on the way back), gently going into her, as if savouring it because a farewell was imminent. Flames from all her limbs leapt to the middle of her as if to greet the guest that slid so ceremoniously in, an unexpected climax far in front of his own. They hadn’t come to her so easily of late, Myra believing that the enlarging animal processes of pregnancy held them back, compensating by the almost visionary light it threw on what was happening to her. Frank lived on the extremity of this influence, the man whom she loved and who, in his own way, looked after her well, out of his own sort of love. But during this mechanism of change he was the person closest to her, and what she dreaded most was the emerging fact that he would soon be removed from this intimate nearness. In calmer moments she realized that this was bound to happen when a child was born, a thought which toned off the sharper edges of her vision. Yet an uneasiness lingered through her dreams, dreams which, since pregnant, she could never remember.
The green hills of Tangier in winter were drenched and heavy. On walking back skyscraper blocks appeared white and pink between olive groves. It was enchanting and new, a fitting scenery in which to change gear and come back to life. Myra puzzled him by her unwillingness or inability to show more of what was going on in her own mind. She drifted uncomplaining, almost happily, enjoying new sights, physical love, the sensual effects of food and travel. He could put it down to pregnancy, but he knew better, wondered instead whether she didn’t resent all that had happened to her since they met, blame him for some unwanted foreign upheaval that his appearance had caused. A sharp pride prevented him asking anything, and he thought maybe she hardly knew herself yet.
At the Place de France a rainstorm burst on them, a leaden throwdown of water that seemed to be trying to stamp all animal life back into the asphalt. The gutters burst, overflowed, and water drove in sheets along the roadway, traffic fighting against it and hardly able to see, trees by the French consulate buckling before the wind. They sat in a café till the storm was spent, watching through the windows, the air heavy with smoke and coffee steam. He ordered brandy, and tea for Myra. ‘We just made it. What an end to the day.’
‘It’s only four o’clock.’
‘Tired?’
‘A bit. I feel good after our walk. I like Tangier, which is just as well, I suppose.’
‘It is, since we’ll be here for a while.’ Yet he hoped not, thought not, but finally couldn’t say. It was hard, if not impossible to stop moving when movement was the only thing that at the moment seemed to be keeping him alive.
22
In youth Shelley had been tender at the lungs, and though that passing phase seemed only to have made him tougher in the end than the average person, he still paid them the homage of maximum protection. Thin and raddled after a week in the whorehouses of Palma, he followed his luggage down the gangplank, his grey overcoat well-buttoned against the damaging wet winds of a Catalonian winter. He looked forward to pouring himself a shot of hot cognac in one of the wilder bars of Barcelona, sliding it in to his favourite toast of ‘Hemingway, I hate you!’
His luggage would stay in the consigna until he found a hotel. Fatigue focused his eyes on the fading labels of his oldest trunk. Since pressing the ejector seat of his job on Madison Avenue he had travelled to many places, and a flaking discoloured label could bring back to him the smell of many a hotel hall from those early days, humidity and mothballs and the fruity reek of an Amazonian forest as he opened the window and wondered once more why the hell he’d stopped in this particular place, parrot-cries and dilapidated streets mouldering into the vast area of shimmering river. Craving the impossible, an ambitious decadent shaped and fired by the fevers of desk-dreams, he took a long time to re-cross the boundary into reality. He’d envisaged a heaven somewhere, a small collapsing corporate state in a back corner of South America whose economy was on the crash — that razor’s edge of heaven between a fabulous exchange rate for dollar-tourists, and a revolutionary upheaval from within — a matter of a few weeks perhaps in which the local currency stood at a thousand pesos to the dollar, with full board at the Grand Hotel Esplendido for ten cents, and the having of some worthy bourgeois beauty for as little as five. He’d never found it, quite, and the search died hard.
He’d wandered around the first two years, an exponent of positive negativism in his desire to forget the past and create his future by recording it as a travel book. These were his own phrases, wicked, sardonic and empty. Not empty, he thought. Emptiness is when you’re full of something that can’t be put to use, or that you cannot define. That’s not me. It was, but not now. The mud and destitution of La Paz, and a proletarian riot in which a police baton had smashed onto his head, had been the blinding light of his Damascus that made him ‘the man at the door with the gun’. He looked old before his time, but with a freshness and naïvety that suggested he might not be able to take advantage of it. He travelled over frontiers, forbidden pamphlets in the false bottom of his trunk when moving legally; panniers of dynamite filched from the copper mines of the Andes when crossing by unfenced jungle towards some hide-out of co-revolutionaries never expecting him but always glad of his loot delivered after enormous risks that they would never take.